9781787333642

Fire Rush

Also by Jacqueline Crooks

The Ice Migration

Fire Rush

Jacqueline Crooks

Jonathan Cape is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Jacqueline Crooks 2023

Jacqueline Crooks has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2023

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB ISBN 9781787333635

TPB ISBN 9781787333642

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Dedicated to Kirsten and Paul Gratitude, always

I had thought of walking far from the terrible Knowledge Of flames. Spathodea. From ghost-ridden Trumpet Tree. From personal Disaster. God’s binding judgement. Drunken mystery

And wisps of smoke from cockpits crying lonely Lonely

But walking in the woods alternating dark with Sunshine

I knew Nothing then of cities or the killing of children In their dancing time.

Olive Senior, ‘Cockpit County Dreams’ in Talking of Trees

Book One

The Crypt: Underground

November 1978– November 1980

If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.

Louis Chude- Sokei, ‘Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process’

1 Follow the Smoke

One o’clock in the morning. Hotfoot, all three of us. Stepping where we had no business.

Tombstone Estate gyals –  Caribbean, Irish. No one expects better. We ain’t IT. But we sure ain’t shit. All we need is a likkle bit of riddim. So we go inna it, deep, into the dance-hall Crypt.

‘Come, nuh,’ Asase calls. Pushing her way down the stairs. Highpriestess glow. Red Ankara cloth wound round her hair like a towering inferno.

Asase is the oldest, twenty- five, a year older than me and Rumer.

Rumer is nothing like her red-haired Irish family. My gyal is dance-taut, tall with a rubber-ribbed belly –  androgynous. Blonde, she dyes her hair Obsidian Black, stuffs it underneath a knitted redgold- green Rasta cap.

We squeeze past chirpsing men. Stand in front of the arched wooden door. Suck in the last of the O2.

I follow Asase inside. My gyal follows the smoke. Beneath barrelvaulted arches. Dance-hall darkness. Pile-up bodies. Ganja clouds. We lean against flesh- eating limestone walls near two coffin- sized speaker boxes that vibrate us into the underworld.

Runnings: the scene goes the usual way; a Rasta pulls Rumer which is good because that’s the only kinda man she’ll dance with.

‘They’re respectful, they’re my bredren,’ she says. A sweet bwoy pulls Asase.

Testing, testing: one, two, three. Lights go on for a few seconds. Only one type of man left for me.

A tall, light- skinned man, face the colour of wet sand, stalked green eyes, standing in his silence. Man pulls me with not so much as a ‘What’s up. Wanna dance?’ Nuth’n.

Watchya: there’re only three kinda man-pulls – usually from behind.

Pull 1: grip above elbow; pull- back- bend-ram-hard-rubbing.

Options: forget it!

Pull 2: hand- grip- spin-face-to-face- body- check-ram-rub.

Options: none. Best give up your body for one tune –  at the very least.

Pull 3: soft bwoy tap on shoulder.

Options: nuff.

This man’s trouble. I can tell by his use of Pull 1 and the size of his belt and the way he jooks himself into my centre of gravity. His body’s not tuned for riddims; it’s flexed for the war zones of history, the battles of the streets.

I tip my arse, inch my pubic bone away from his hard- on.

He puts his mouth to my ear, warm breath: ‘Simmer down.’ Flattens his palms against my batty, pulls me back in.

Version after B- side instrumental version, he grips me. Wordless. We’re in a crypt in the thick of duppy dust; lost rivers, streams and sewers bubbling beneath us.

Smoke’s taken over, thickening, choking me. And I wonder why I attract these kinda men, who are just like my father. Men who strike fear in people just by the way they stand. Skewering the silence with their stares.

Four dances in before I make my soft- gyal excuse, mouth ‘Gotta go. Toilet.’

Man nods. I exhale. One floor up, I sit in the toilet cubicle. Smell candles and incense and old wood from the church. Light my spliff, suck more smoke into my lungs, feel Muma shoot into my veins.

I hear her song, her voice, treble, reed and flute. She cuts inna me with soundwaves, singing: ‘Daughter, I-and- I is tune.’ Spirit or not, Muma’s all I’ve got. The only one I trust.

‘Stay,’ I whisper. But she’s gone.

I imagine my ganja smoke snaking around my dance partner, dragging him into the afterworld beneath the Crypt. But the man’s waiting for me downstairs, to raas. One hand clipped on his belt like he’s toting a gun.

‘Inna it, baby,’ he says, and pulls me into the dance hall, positions me against the wall, wedges himself into my body.

I hold my breath, and pray for a rootsy liberation track to put him off his slow-winding moves. But I’m locked in. Tune after tune after tune.

Three o’clock in the morning. We’re ten feet below and the town’s weighing down on us. Stench of sweat, stale gases and lead.

‘Soon come,’ man shouts in my ear. ‘Need a light.’ He takes a cigarette out.

I mek my move quick- time, slip into the mass of closed- eyed skankers, sucked into the slipstream of rippling spines. Try to get as close as I can to the decks, watch the MC, see how he handles the mic and the controls. We’re dancing in darkness, skinning up with the dead. I feel them twisting around me, round and round, rattles on their wrists and ankles, broken- beat bodies of sound. The Dub Master spinning versions of delayed time. Slackjawed, slicking- up words from tongue root. I wanna take the mic from his hand, blaze fire on Babylon. In my head, I’m chatting lyrics:

come mek we hear it from the uptown posse get down get down every posse drive forward fire!

Bodies rippling like seagrass. Synthesising air and bass.

Inna caves of sound, we skank low, spirits high. Drop moves as offerings to the soundboxes, wooden deities full of fading voices.

The regulars are scattered around the square, pillared vault. Rocked by storm sounds, swaying under the shelter of arches, some pressed tight against the walls. Others bubbling in the epicentre, below low-hovering smoke clouds. Strangers pass through, hold position on the edges. There’s Eustace, the owner of Dub Steppaz Records, skanking next to the decks, one hand behind his back, the other steering the air. There’s Cynthia, the lovers-rock queen with a bronze- sprayed Afro, who cradles her sagging womb when she sings, rocking from side to side to reggae love songs. And Lego in the middle of the dance floor, two- stepping best he can with his artificial leg. Skanking hard-hard, using his walking stick like a spear, firing it inna the air, shouting, ‘Mash down Babylon.’ Nobody knows if he’s lost his mind or found a higher consciousness, like our men who lead the marches and rallies, chanting ‘Black Power’ over the heads of the sistren.

Lovers-rock time and our bodies are ships rolling through smoke and heat, under pressure from treble and bass. I sway in the broiling centre, far from the walls where men move with mute biological urgency, stabilising themselves with the weight of women.

The MC calls out over the mic, a voice in the darkness, shouting

above the waves of sound. The deck’s where I’ve always wanted to be. Changing the sonic direction. I’d fling down a rootsy dub track of the ancients chanting stories about the divinity of our emperors. Tek it to the outtasphere.

Someone takes my hand. Eases me around.

I wipe sweat from my eyes, look up. Dim lights from the decks flash on and off and I make out a face that’s a smile resting on rocks. He’s looking down at me as if he’s known me from beyond time, cables of blue smoke twisting above his head.

He puts his mouth to my ear, says his name is Moose.

‘OK for this dance?’ he asks.

I see a wide- bridged nose, thick lips scrunched like he’s chewing his thoughts. Yeah, he’s one of dem men whose beauty is a throwback from the past.

‘I’m Yamaye,’ I say and give him the nod. He positions a thigh between my legs. Puts his arms on my shoulders, keeps his crotch a polite distance away from my pubic bone. Electric guitars riffing. Groaning vocals. We dance, rub-adub- squatting, and his cheek grazes mine. Drifting scents of vanilla, cocoa beans and pine trees waft off his neck. I tremble as we sway under the limewashed roof.

With my body pressed against his, I feel the ancient songs vibrating beneath his ribs: Tambu, Sa Leone, Jawbone. This man’s different. From the electricity running through me, I feel like my ending is gonna be charged inna his fate.

Everyone’s in their power. The room’s a furnace, sweating bodies. Moose takes my hand, pushes his way out of the Crypt.

‘Let’s get air,’ he says.

We go up the metal stairway and the man’s still holding my hand. When was the last time anybody held my hand besides Rumer or Asase? I slip my fingers out of his fist; pull myself together.

Out the side door into the churchyard where the paved walkway leads on to the high street. Into the cold November air.

Norwood is one of those small industrial towns on the western edge of London. Part village, part suburb, an overgrowth of the city. It’s 1978, but the town feels outside of time, trapped somewhere in its past. The history books say it was built in the clearing of a forest of thorn trees that was once the site of pagan rituals, not far from the marshy banks of a prehistoric river. Mammoth bones and teeth are sometimes found by workmen ploughing deep inna the earth.

I blink my stinging eyes, take long, slow breaths of oxygen and exhale into the deep- blue night. Micro- bubbles of sound float in the air. The smell of rotting weeds from the old graveyard and the feeling that the dead might rise with the sensimilla smoke and supra-watt riddims.

Lighting from the side windows of the church backglows us. I take a better look at Moose: bronze- brown skin, irises patterned like the grain of trees. He’s smiling at me from some shaded internal space.

Heat in my veins and a stabbing feeling in my groin.

‘I came for the Dub Master,’ he says, his voice the sing- song- bling of Caribbean islands. Says he’s been in the country eight years.

‘Nothing else round here,’ I say. ‘Unless you count the Wolf Pub or the cattle market.’

He looks me up and down, smiling. ‘Looks like plenty going on.’

We walk to the front of the church, cotch on the wall, check the people on the other side of the main road: youth quabs with deadroute eyes and back-pocket knives, heading north towards the railway line that cuts through the heart of the town; an old man wiping down the tables in Delhi Wala cafe, preparing for the morning shift, the lights flickering above him.

‘You’re shivering,’ Moose says. He takes off his suede Gabicci and drapes it over me.

I pull it around my shoulders.

‘It’s intense down there,’ I say.

The man I was dancing with earlier skulks past with another man. They’re talking on the down-low; they both seem vex.

Moose sees the way I look at him and asks if I know who he is.

‘Never met him before tonight,’ I say. ‘Man pulled me to dance and wouldn’t let me go.’

‘Mind yuhself. Name’s Crab Man, check the way he walks. Feet go one way, eyes the other. Watch his eyes. Never worry ’bout the legs.’

‘’Nough man like that round here.’ I look at Moose in his black silk shirt, shimmering like dark water, and wonder what kinda man he is.

‘No, this man holds women down inna his yard. Does what he wants.’ He throws his arms outwards. ‘Dashes them out like trash. Stabbed a few brothers. Never does time. Finds another hiding hole –  like this town.’

I cross my arms, holding on to the empty sleeves of his jacket. ‘How do you know him?’

‘I rave all over. Don’t check me so. That ain’t my style.’

‘Man dem carrying on a-ways.’

He puts an arm across my shoulder, rests his head against mine, and points to the purple universe braided with beads and sequins.

‘Look,’ he says, and I feel his breath against my face, soft and sweet and warm. ‘Planets, stars,’ he says.

‘My ears and guts are ringing from the bassline, can’t focus on anything else.’

‘Hard-hitting down there. Voltage strong enough for a nosebleed.’

We laugh and he presses his body closer, takes my hand.

I look at the side of his face. Profile like mountain ridges; wanna

trace my finger from his forehead to nose to lips to chin back to lips so I can push my finger in.

‘We’re all travelling,’ Moose says. ‘Like stars.’

There are shouts nearby. Crab Man and the other man are arguing at the entrance to the church. Crab Man’s deep, rasping voice makes me shudder.

‘It’s cold,’ I say. ‘Let’s go inside. I need to link with my friends.’

We go into the dance hall. Lovers rock is still playing. Moose presses his face into my hair and we dance, winding low, our thigh muscles trembling against each other. Bassline coming through his heart into mine, jooking us together. There’s no oxygen now. We’re high on duppy gas, more spirits than earthly bodies.

I rest my face against his chest, lean against the raft of his ribs. Close my eyes, wonder how long this feeling can last.

When the lights go on, the MC announces next week’s dance and an upcoming Misty in Roots concert. Asase and Rumer wind back through the crowd. They stand on either side of me, checking Moose. I introduce them.

Moose nods, but I check the way he looks at Asase – how all men do, like everything has blurred and she’s the only thing they can see.

Rumer is coughing and wheezing. The damp Crypt sometimes sets off her asthma. I lay my arm across her back.

Asase stands in front of Moose, arms folded, head cocked, lips curled like red fuse wire. ‘Which parts you from?’

‘East,’ he says.

‘Where’s your crew?’

‘Man can go solo now and then, can’t he?’

At five foot ten, Asase’s eyes are only a few inches below Moose’s.

The Dub Master is calling, ‘Last dance, last dance. Tek your partners.’

Asase sways her hips to the lovers rock cry, tipping forward. Next

thing her arms are around Moose’s neck and they’re dancing. Close rub-a- dub style.

Moose looks at me over Asase’s shoulder, raises his eyebrows into a question. I cut my eyes on him. A dread weight drops inna my belly. I look at the back of Asase’s head. Never know how far she’ll go. But it’s gonna go the way it always does; Asase will get whatever the raas she wants.

Lights flash on and off. On again.

Six in the morning.

The MC calling out, ‘Dis yah dance is done!’

I link arms with Rumer and she leans on me as we walk out. Asase walks in front, stepping the language of the streets, a bounce in her feet that says dis gyal’s got things under control. Moose hangs back a little. We follow a slow line of linked lovers, groups and lone ravers up the stairs to the ground floor. And I swear two hundred people pile into the Crypt each night and five hundred leave, ancient spirits reanimated by sensimilla and body heat.

Bongo Natty is talking to people as they leave. He runs the sessions at the Crypt. He takes money at the door, preaches to people as they come in, preaches to them on the way out.

‘Conscious vibrations, sistren,’ he says.

His real name is Nathaniel Bailey, but everyone knows him as Bongo Natty because he organises marches where he drums and calls for Black revolution. He gives us red flyers about a new march against the sus law that says a policeman can just arrest a bredda on the street for riddim walking, skin-up talking, nose-hole breathing. Black being.

‘Sound the revolution, iyah,’ he says. ‘See oonuh next week –  if life spare.’ His voice is almost a whisper, womanly soft.

He plays it cool, but he’s like all the other men –  rebels, rude bwoys, my poopa –  super- sensitised to danger, set on survival

mode, stepping on the streets, torsos swinging from their waists like obeah men, with panoramic views of a world that’s out to get them.

Outside, the early-morning air is damp and grey, a strange apocalyptic silence; receding songs inside my head.

Hard- backed, hungry men pull women aside, plant dry-mouthed suggestions in their ears. Women, their hot-iron curls collapsed against boom- boom skulls, use their lungs like abeng horns to blow smoke outta their bodies.

We walk the concrete path that cuts through the front graveyard. My body is radioactive with sound and ganja, struggling to understand the game Asase is playing. Maybe she’s sweeting-up Moose to get us a ride. Maybe she wants him for herself.

Moose’s black Rover is parked with all the other cars further down the street, on the other side of the road near the Manor House, a decaying, timber-framed building that has gone through many incarnations; currently, it’s some kind of business centre.

Men cotch against the bonnets of cars, clicking teeth, scanning women as they go by.

‘You tekking us home?’ Asase asks Moose. ‘Everyone back to my yard? There’s yellow yam and stewed peas.’ She runs the tip of her tongue across her lips.

‘Why not,’ he says.

Asase slides into the front seat. Rumer climbs into the back behind Asase. I sit behind Moose, lean against the leather headrest.

‘Girl, you’re fast,’ Rumer tells Asase. Her asthmatic voice is husky, as if she’s running out of air.

‘Don’t start,’ Asase says, her tone light, playful.

The car smells of him, blue river skimmed with musk. ‘Lonely Nights’ is playing on the cassette. The reverb fades and I’m back from the outtasphere. Inna my body. Back on the lonely streets of town. The isolated offbeat keys of a piano.

Asase directs Moose through the town, a town of Sikh temples, churches, mosques, tower blocks, five streams, two brooks and one river. Resurrection Cemetery, a rectangular piece of land that is full and accepting no more bodies. More bones than living flesh in our town.

Thin arrows of rain pelt the car windows. Hunched-hooded souls on the streets of duppy wandering. We drive past Dub Steppaz where the rude bwoys from the Crypt are now packed inside, taking refuge from the approaching daylight, pinned to the walls like myal men, their eyes rolling rocksteady. Into the Dead Water area, the car floating alongside the still-as- death canal. Across the hump bridge into the Tombstone Estate, a housing complex shaped like a tongue, surrounded by a dry ditch. An ancient well in the centre of the estate, in a dip surrounded by earthen banks, a metal cover. The old people say it’s a sacred well of red iron water that used to run bright with crystals. The white concrete tower blocks where we live look out over the cemetery and the surrounding wastelands, and are connected by low, narrow buildings like railway carriages, a superstructure packed with people who light candles, smoke, drink, pound herbs – anything to dispel the scattered energy of ghosts that rise from the cemetery wanting the sounds of life. Skull and crossbones graffiti on the walls.

Moose pulls up at Asase’s block and everyone gets out.

‘I’m charged. Gonna head home,’ I say.

‘You’re not eating with us?’ says Asase.

Rumer takes my arm. ‘Count me out too.’ Her scratchy- scratchy voice sounds like a stranger is trapped in her chest. She sucks on her inhaler.

Moose says he’ll drop me home, but I point to the high-rise tower in front of us, tell him I’m already in my manor, I’ll be fine. I take off his Gabicci and give it to him. He tells me to keep it till next time. I insist on returning it now.

Asase says she’ll give Moose something to eat before his drive home. She smiles inna my eyes. ‘Check me tomorrow, ladies.’

Rumer and I walk towards her flat, say goodbye, hug. I make my way to my tower block, where grey-white curtains billow like spirits at dark windows and metal coffin lifts shuttle between heaven and hell.

Options: none.

I ride the lift to our flat on the seventeenth floor. It opens into the dim hallway that leads to my door and straight inna Muma’s front room. Everything’s the way she left it twenty years ago, or so my poopa says. Yellow doilies wilting on the sofas like orchids. A silver ribbon microphone and a case of jazz records. Paintings of blue mountains, green sea, white ships in the distance –  a portal to her world.

It’s a small, one-level flat. A living room, two bedrooms, a concrete balcony strung with green plastic washing lines, a galley kitchen with a fold- down red Formica table, black root cracks on the walls.

I smell Irving’s roll-up, the mush of loamy tropical earth. He’s in the kitchen, sitting at the table reading the Caribbean News, scratching his metal- shavings-picky-picky hair. Irving, my poopa, is a panel beater. He resurrects broken cars, soldering, welding, spewing sparks. A red- skinned bush man from Falmouth, the capital of Trelawny, Jamaica. He says he’s got Taino and Maroon blood; says he survived extinction. Once he told me that his father’s father traced their bloodline by drawing circles of ganja smoke above the soil. That’s as much as he’ll say about our family history.

I don’t resemble my poopa, though there’s a look on his face sometimes that I recognise in my own. It’s the way his mouth changes with his mood, a drawstring knotting flesh over bone like a stubborn root.

I call him by his first name to maintain the distance he’s carved out between us, same as the distance between Mother Earth and space.

Me and that man are atoms, exploded out of the same haze. Ablaze in different zones.

Most days, he suffocates the atmosphere with his silence. Only speaking to ask, ‘Who you is, fe true? Your mother’s child more than mine, that’s who.’ Yet, when I’m sick, he makes ginger tea and fish soup, spicy-hot with red bells of Scotch bonnet peppers. And he’ll soak tissues in Bay Rum which he puts on my pillow so that I can breathe. God, it feels good to be ill dem days. He can be caring, but more often he’s cruel. What do I make of a man who carries on dem ways, his heart locked in a cage?

Irving’s belt used to be his tongue. He’s sixty- six, and the older he gets, the less he talks, only going out to see his friends at the Wolf Pub on the other side of town. Claims his memory is no good.

‘Dancing with the dead again?’ he asks, rolling his paper. ‘Every week ah de Crypt, de Crypt.’

‘And?’

‘You too follow-fashion.’ He lashes the air with the newspaper like a baton. ‘Me tell you not to go where everybody go. Not to think like everybody outta street.’

He takes his roll-up from the edge of the ashtray, inhales. His face is eaten out, the flesh of his cheeks hanging in the hollows of his cheekbones.

‘Skinning up wid bad- breed man!’ he says. I fill a glass with water and gulp it down.

I wanna ask him what the raas he knows ’bout anything apart from his work as a mechanic, tuning cars and bustin’ handbrake spins, but the memory of the whip- sting beatings from my childhood always shuts me down. Yuh too outta order! Come in late from school, disturb the neighbours with loud music. Whatever I did that bothered him, he’d tell me – sentences punctuated with lashes – that Muma would be ashamed.

I hardly remember Muma in this house. She was an orphan, born in Portland, Jamaica, raised by missionaries somewhere in Kingston. After she married Irving, she became a midwife in Norwood, but she left when I was three or four to work in Guyana, and died there too young. That’s all I know.

I remember one of the two or three memorials for her at the Pentecostal church. I must have been five or six. Afterwards, the flat full of people dressed in black; Oraca, Asase’s mother, squeezing my hand, crying; Irving shaking his head as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened.

It’s one of the reasons I stay here – wanna be close to what’s left of her. Waiting for Irving to tell me more about her; waiting for him to love me the way he must’ve once loved her.

‘Going to bed,’ I say.

‘Gwaan, sleep all day like the dead.’ He puts his roll-up between his lips, puffs, dips the beams of his eyes.

In my room I play a dubplate mixtape on the down-low, chat freestyle on my mic, let my anger out.

I send myself up in smoke. Wait for overstanding, looking at the picture of Muma on my bedside table. Dark brown skin. Blackpepper freckles. Plaits woven around her head like a basket. Lips apart, ready to sing- song some snake outta her hair.

Through the window, light from the fading moon, silvery as Muma’s taffeta dress. I close my eyes, smell khus khus, earth and rainforest. My face burns at the thought of Asase sweeting-up Moose, taking something away from me, because she’s good at that. Even when we were children, she would push me out of the scene if I stood between her and the attention she wanted. Magnetic as she is, sometimes I wonder if my fear of her outweighs my love.

I turn on some old, favourite dub tracks. I grew up listening to Irving play his Trojan records. Ska into rocksteady into reggae. The

offbeats and rhythmic patterns of my growth synced to the emerging sound of dub.

The dead come to us through familiar sound waves. I chant, call Muma inna fire-rush tongue: ‘Weh you deh?’

Muma’s in the pit of my belly, like one of the pickney she used to birth. She’s pushing me the way she always does, trying to get inna the world.

I breathe fast.

Her voice spins up outta my belly, like it does when I feel alone. I hear her in the air around me, a crying falsetto with living heat. Maybe she’s keeping watch over me. Or I’m imagining her because I’m still a mystery to myself.

She’s singing as she always does and I hear her:

‘sending my dream always be seen daughter let me tek you to the sea ’

Thunder and lightning in my heart; sound and beat together, making fire. I set the levels on my mic to get my deep vocals right. But there’s static, a loose connection somewhere. Muma’s voice fades. I push the amp in. The microphone is humming.

‘Muma?’ I whisper. The room’s silent.

I hold my breath.

Nothing but thin wisps of smoke.

I’ve lost her again.

Abeng Horns

Nine thirty in the morning on a cold, bright Saturday. Asase, Rumer and me huddle at the bus stop near Dub Steppaz, waiting for the 207 into London. The record shop is one of our few places of refuge in dis yah town. Riddim is the foundation for all of them: dance hall; Pentecostal church where people sway and stomp, waiting for the white smoke of the Holy Ghost to enter their bodies; and Dub Steppaz, a fortress of black vinyl.

All of them governed by men.

I like to go to Dub Steppaz on my way home from the night shift, eight in the morning when the shop has the CLOSED sign in the window, before it’s full of men jostling for dubplates in the smallisland oasis. The walls plastered with glossy vinyl sleeves of Caribbean beaches and rainforests, musical revolutionaries in Kente print robes, their dreadlocks trailing into the earth, becoming the roots of trees. The ceiling painted with hummingbirds.

Eustace lets me in and locks the door, gives me a mug of coffee while he wipes down the counters and polishes the vinyl, a raregroove track playing, something about silver shadows.

Eustace is a square-jawed man in his early forties; not exactly old, but with enough experience and wisdom to keep the youth on solid ground. Mothers and grandmothers drop in on their way from the market to get advice from him about a son or grandson running wild.

Asase loves nothing better than pushing herself into the crowded record shop late on Saturday afternoons when we return from the city. By that time it’s ram-up with men, their arses pressed against the window, criss- crossing smoke above them. Rumer always tries to drag her past the shop, but it’s pointless. Asase opens the door and eases herself in and – yeah, we follow.

She’ll work her way to the back of the room where the records are stacked in tiered wooden cabinets. Me and Rumer go to the far side and pile our bags on the narrow counter that’s littered with empty cans of beer. The place smells of body odour, stale rum and roll-up tobacco.

Asase likes to flick slowly through the vinyl, undulating her spine to the music as if it’s a divining rod and she’s seeking the water’s flow. She sucks up the attention as men sidle up to her, asking ‘What’s up, baby-love?’ If it gets too ram and rude bwoys get agitated, Eustace will raise the counter and let us stand with him.

Now I knock on the shop window and wave to Eustace. He waves back and then returns to sorting vinyl.

We board the half- empty bus for the hour-long ride into London, still dub-travelling on the undertow of ghostly basslines from the Crypt where we were dancing with Moose until dawn. He picked us up from Asase’s place like he has done more or less every weekend since that first night a few weeks ago.

We’ve done danced Friday into the stratosphere, skanking as if our lives depended on it, scooping the air with our hands, backkicking like we were treading water. We grabbed a fresh – a cat-wash and change of clothes – at Asase’s yard. Mopped up stewed fish with breadfruit, dozed, smoked ourselves awake – or kinda. From rave to street, no sleep. That’s the way we run it half the time.

I stare out the window, feeling Asase’s weight shift into me as the bus turns.

Sometimes Asase goes home with a man after a blues party to get her tings. Other times, I spend the night with her, waking up Sunday afternoon, dozing on the maroon velvet sofa in the back room of her yard, watching black-and-white films with the curtains drawn while Oraca’s in the kitchen. Oraca cooks nuth’n but fish: stewed, fried, boiled, but mostly stuffed with herbs. The house always smells of fish and the sea.

After dinner, when we’re half- crazed from the fallout of ganja high and sound- system nosebleeds, Oraca lights candles and puts a jazz record on, the volume humming on the low- down like a distant sea.

We get on the floor, eat escovitch red snapper from big glass bowls, push our plates away and lie on our sides, Asase on Oraca’s right, me on her left, and Oraca telling us about Queen Nanny of Jamaica, a Maroon leader. She tells us this with sound hissing through the tunnels of her clenched teeth.

‘People call them runaway slaves. No! They fought the British and won. Nobody could put Queen Nanny and her warriors under manners. She was a supernatural leader. Her tactic was sound – longrange communication, the abeng horn.’

Maybe the way Muma sings to me is the same. She’s transmitting memories. Like dub and reggae, communicating our history.

In London, Asase, Rumer and me float down side streets of boutiques starlit for Christmas, wading through the light, trailing smoke. Yes, iyah! We’re high. Puss- eyed sunshades on, cooling our bodies in the glass- city.

We push through the swelling morning crowds of crutchers, shoppers, boasty in pavement bars pecking breakfast food like they don’t know how to nyaam.

‘I’m mash-up,’ Rumer says. She rummages in her green-beaded clutch bag, finds her inhaler, sucks in whatever magic is in the blue tube.

‘Gimme some a dat,’ Asase says. She grabs it, breathes in. Coughs.

‘Yuh crazy raas,’ Rumer says.

‘Stuff’s good,’ Asase says. ‘Let’s tek the city. Shop by shop till we drop.’

Rumer leans on Asase, holds her arm, eases her right foot out of her gold- tipped shoe. Stubby toes swollen and grey as slugs. She looks up at Asase and says, ‘My feet are sore.’ And there’s that strange look in her eyes that she gets sometimes when she’s close to Asase. Red flushing her face like she’s blooming and bleeding at the same time.

‘You’re saaaft. Twisting up yuh foot wid skanking,’ Asase says. She pulls away and marches ahead.

Street vendors toss peanuts in spinning copper plates that hum caramel notes like the flipside of a 45.

Tuuune in.

Tuune in till a morning.

People stare at us. We don’t dress pop. We spin our garments different, wear our music on our bodies. Whipcrack pleats, spliced textures, rewind old-time swing skirts, turned-up bling.

I look at Asase. What-a-way she brucks style. There’s Rumer in her men’s grey Farah trousers and suede waistcoat, and me in my stitched- seam jeans, gold-tipped patent shoes. But Asase? My girl has customised a pair of cream high heels with diamond- encrusted toecaps –  Stix- Gyal style –  matched with an A-line georgette skirt, big-arse ducket on a rope chain doubled around her throat.

She stops and eyes a sashay dress with transparent bodice and rainbow pleats through a shop window. Bad’n’raas stylish. Cut to kill.

‘That garment’s gonna be the price of a second-hand Spitfire,’ Rumer says. ‘Probably get you inna jus’ as much trouble.’

‘Watchyah, nuh!’ Asase says.

She presses the buzzer. Waits. Rings again. Two saleswomen, folding shirts, look up, assess and dismiss us with rigor mortis smiles. A blonde with fire- bombed rouged cheeks looks at the clock on the wall and shakes her head.

Asase takes out her snakeskin purse, holds it up and points to the outfit. Mouths, ‘Five minutes,’ filling the narrow doorway with her broad- shouldered stance.

They buzz us in. The blonde woman folds the dress and wraps it in bright pink tissue paper.

‘I want a top-notch carrier bag for my garment, nothing plastic,’ Asase says to the assistant as she writes a cheque.

I look at the signatory’s name printed on the chequebook: Lucy Blewitt. I wonder who the hell this Lucy is, and I can’t believe that Asase is hustling again.

Me and Rumer work nights at Bonemedica on the production line, operating machines and inspecting components –  bolts and screws that fix the broken parts of people’s bodies. A sprawling grey- brick building in the industrial area south of the railway, full of factories making canned meat, bread, pottery. We sleep in the daytime, come alive at night.

Asase works part-time for a company in the city that makes perfumes. Dressed in silk wrap dresses, sniffing and mixing. ‘Like mekking music,’ she says. ‘Every scent’s a note.’

She doesn’t need to hustle. She earns enough to rent her own flat, but she’s saving to buy a double-fronted house in the fancy town where she went to school. On her days off, she goes to the city with other crutchers, stealing clothes from designer shops, shoving them between their legs.

When me and Rumer are at Bonemedica in the dead of night with the other late- shift workers, Rumer’s like a ghost, her thin frame hunched over the desk, inspecting the parts and updating the

maintenance logs, her pale freckled face covered in tan foundation. She’s quieter when it’s just the two of us, as if she needs Asase’s energy to fire her up. I wonder why she comes to the Crypt, the only white woman, getting bounced by Stix- Gyals, tuff’n’raas women like Asase, who hustle and fight to survive. They wanna know why she’s there, where she’s from. ‘You mixed or what?’ they ask her. ‘Irish,’ she’ll tell them.

Rumer’s family are Travellers. They move from town to town, country to country, in their caravans. She left them five years ago to get away from a man they wanted her to marry. The council gave her a studio flat.

Rumer’s like me, trying to find where she fits. If she believes in ghosts or spirits, she won’t say. When I try to talk to her about Muma or the things I hear, she tells me: ‘Girl, that’s just vibrations.’

The blonde shop assistant looks at the signature on the chequebook and compares it with the chequecard. She stares at Asase and Asase smiles inna her face. Not a real smile, a hard-faced show of teeth. The woman puts the dress into a silver cardboard bag and hands it to Asase.

‘Sweet,’ Asase says, except her tone might as well be saying ‘Fuck you’.

Once we’re back on the street I ask Asase where she got the chequebook. She doesn’t answer.

‘You can do serious time for stolen chequebooks,’ I say. ‘Who gave it to you? Do you know what they could have done to that woman?’

I almost never raise my voice with Asase, but there’s been a sick feeling in my stomach since I watched her dance with Moose that night we first met, and a glow in my fists when I think of the risk she’s exposing us to.

A fat vein twitches on Asase’s temple.

‘Chip, if you don’t like it!’ She’s in my face, her eyes popping. Then she links arms with Rumer. ‘You won’t go soft on me,’ she says to her.

‘Gyal, you’re outta order,’ Rumer tells her. But she doesn’t resist; she always gives in to Asase’s touch.

What made Asase such a force? Maybe it’s her family being from Alligator Pond, a fishing village in a valley between the Santa Cruz and Don Figuerero Mountains. The first people to navigate the sea and set foot on the island over a thousand years ago. Or maybe she’s different because her father, Hezekiah, is a man who does what he wants and raised Asase to do the same. Like the time Asase’s mother, Oraca, realised she was sneaking out to the Crypt when she was only thirteen. Hezekiah said to leave her be; the sooner she learned how to handle men, the better. She learned how to handle men, for sure. And now that Hezekiah no longer lives with them, she back- chats him in ways that even Oraca never could.

Or maybe Asase is different because she didn’t go to the same rundown school as me and Rumer. Father Mullaney wrote a letter for Oraca and got Asase into a quality Catholic school.

Babylon school is where I learned not to do my thing. Redstone Secondary seems such a long time ago. Rumer came to my school when she was fifteen. We both left when we were sixteen. I used to sing in the choir. They were happy for us to entertain them in return for us receiving their stories of history. Teachers with bullwhip tongues, faster than the speed of sound, talking about their conquests, plagues and fires.

I learned plenty about their history, but I had to go to the library to educate myself. Read up on some of the things Oraca told me about the Black Atlantic, the abeng horn, the revolution of sound.

Asase went to a school fifteen miles away, in a sleepy town with a

cricket green, hanging flower baskets, gardens with treehouses. She liked the uniform: a blue blazer with brass buttons, pleated skirt, and black tie with gold stripes that made her look like she was in the navy. She always carried on extra. I suspected she was trying to climb the ladder out of Norwood, seeking friends in higher places.

The lights in the shops go out. Asase and Rumer march ahead on the darkening streets. Best shut me mouth: the sistren need each other on the streets, in the dance hall. Together we are a three-pin plug, charging ourselves to dub riddim. Connecting through each other to the underground.

I look at their backs; they’re almost the same height. Rumer’s tall, slim body dressed like a Stix- Man, a hard-man- criminal, arms linked with Asase, slightly taller, who is sashaying her arse as if to tell me I can kiss it.

I think of the many nights I’ve spent in Asase’s bed. It was some time after Hezekiah ran off with that young woman, when Asase was sixteen, that she developed a night-time ritual of stripping naked, dropping her clothes and underwear in a pool around her ankles. The first time she did it, I looked at the web of her black pubic roots, then her face.

What the fuck was she carrying on with?

She was nothing like Oraca and everything like Hezekiah, the father she says her spirit can’t tek. Same flared huffing nostrils, cedarcoloured skin, and irises that flickered brown and green like shaken leaves.

She took her blue silk headwrap from under her pillow and covered her hair, all the time her eyes on me, her mouth set in a deep- cut line. I was wearing what I always wore, her oversized T- shirt with ‘Sweet Pussy!’ printed on the front. I pulled it down below my crotch.

She was supposed to light the ready-made spliff that was in the

ashtray on the brass drinks trolley that she used as a bedside table. Then switch off the lamp, take a deep drag of ganja and pass it to me, like she always did. We would then blow smoke above our heads and watch it form ideas that we’d try to articulate before they dispersed into silver particles of sound. Then wake the following Sunday around lunchtime, our legs wrapped around each other, face to face, lips almost touching. We always woke that way, no matter how we set our bodies and intentions before we went to sleep.

Only that night she whispered, ‘Yuh best wash your feet.’

‘What?’

Silence, then zinging in my ears, like I’d been boxed in the head. She screamed at me, ‘Your feet! They’re dirty! You think you can just walk across the bare floor and get into my bed?’

I didn’t move for a few seconds. She was breathing hard. I went to the bathroom and washed my feet, although there was nothing to wash. The wooden floor was polished and spotless. Was she listening for the sound of running water? Would she want to inspect my heels? Poke her fingers between my toes? I walked across the floor and stepped on to the orange sheepskin rug and got into the bed. I turned my back on her and curled into a ball.

I feel the same stress now, watching her and Rumer walk away.

It always takes me time to realise someone’s hurting me. A few minutes, a day, a year. Twenty-four years. Four hundred years. But at some point there’s the familiar feeling as my blood picks up speed, tracks and traces some evolutionary chemical inside my gut.

Rage.

In front of me city loners appear as if they’ve bubbled up from underground streams. Steam winds out from basement bars. Shop lights are searchlights. Sirens blare in the distance. I think of our people who’ll be snatched from the streets, swallowed by Black